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Comment by incomingpain | Hacker News Reader

I wish freakonomics had an rss feed.

The thing that's happening right now is that many large cities have more or less enabled the possibility of carless transport. Cycling is now completely viable and even better, costco has a foldable ebike for like $400. Weather sucks? Work from home instead. Gotta go? Taxis and buses exist. What do you pay in car insurance? $1000/year? How many trips in the bus is that? Many! You also dont pay for parking anymore. Cycling is great exercise burning fat instead of money. It's a huge net benefit to society which is 70% overweight. National wealth will certainly increase.

Which brings me to traffic lights. Cyclists already don't obey them. Why don't we just abolish them? Traffic lights function just fine when they go out or blink red.

If stop signs replacing all traffic lights is an inconvenience for cars... might I recommend a bike?

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Why do anti-car people not seem to understand that people don't want to ride a bike everywhere? You can't just tell someone to completely change their lifestyle to avoid potential problems, and then act like they are the insane ones for not wanting to listen. I want a car. I like my car. Demanding that people give up their ability to get in a car and drive somewhere so that all of America's infrastructure can be changed is insanity.

>The thing that's happening right now is that many large cities have more or less enabled the possibility of carless transport.

I actually like to leave the cities I live in sometimes. Or maybe I don't live in a city, and I want to visit it with my car.

The ability of exurban dwellers to visit a city with their car is of no interest to the people in that city. Why should they care?

Are you sure? A city that’s unwelcome to commuting workers, local visitors coming in for entertainment, shopping, dinners etc. may not be a city that the city dwellers want. Of course they’re welcome to discourage visitors however they want.

My city has throngs of people coming in via transit whenever there’s a major sporting event or concert. I know, I’ve shared trains with them many times. You don’t have to get there by car.

In my experience most are coming from nearby suburbs, not exurbs. While I might take the commuter rail in for a major sporting event or concert even if it might mean waiting around—or park at an outlying transit lot—It’s pretty impractical for most evening events and this is a major city with pretty good transportation options generally.

City residents can do whatever they want but I for one will simply not come in in general if it’s too big a hassle. And that’s fine. I have plenty of other things to do.

> City residents can do whatever they want but I for one will simply not come in in general if it’s too big a hassle. And that’s fine. I have plenty of other things to do.

Agreed, it is fine. As a city resident I would rather have fewer people coming in and a more walkable environment than more people coming in and streets clogged with cars. We should make sure the transit is excellent, but if some people don’t want to come in because they want to drive and it’s difficult, that’s fine! Too many people driving in makes the city an unpleasant place to be in.

Virtually every city in America destroyed itself in the pursuit of what you suggest: everyone will live out in Whiteville and they'll just drive downtown for culture, commerce, and employment. It didn't work. The freeways and parking lots cost too much, and the commuters don't pay enough taxes to balance it out.

And many don't mostly need to come downtown for commerce or employment any longer. And culture can be a handful of times a year. That's my situation. I rarely come into the nearest major city any longer. It's not that I don't come in but I'm very selective.

Well it sounds like we agree then. There's no reason for a city to hollow out its neighborhoods to make space for the cars of people who drive into town once a year.

The issue is that cars do not scale well. It's like running a tech company where IT manually triages every single ticket, with no self-service system: after a certain point, you just can't scale it up. Think of public transit, walking, cycling, scooters, etc. as the real-world transportation equivalent of automation. Cars take up a massive amount of space for a single person and dump tons of CO2, pollutants, and noise into their surroundings. And they routinely kill and/or maim people.

It's fine to own a car, park it in your garage space in a city, and use it to drive out of the city from time to time. It isn't OK for cars to dominate 50% of the space in modern American cities for roads, free street parking, and parking lots. Particularly because it comes at the expense of space that could be used for more scalable transportation solutions.

> Or maybe I don't live in a city, and I want to visit it with my car.

Sure, feel free to drive to the other city by car. But in a more scalable world without hellish traffic, you'll have to get around on foot, by bike/scooter, or using public transit in the city. Because cars aren't scalable.

> It isn't OK for cars to dominate 50% of the space in modern American cities for roads, free street parking, and parking lots. Particularly because it comes at the expense of space that could be used for more scalable transportation solutions.

50% sounds extremely generous. There are 8 parking spots per car and one car per person which is around 350m^2 of area per person (some portion of which is stacked).

This is one median lot per household on parking alone.

>Why do anti-car people not seem to understand that people don't want to ride a bike everywhere?

To be upfront, I'm a car guy. My last car had >700hp, currently a hot hatch. Soon I have to go dadmobile, vw camper id buzz... oh do tell me more.

My bike? I bought one of those huge/wide bike seats. My bike seat is worth more than my bike lol. I find it crazy there are people with ultra light carbon fiber sport bicycles about to be stolen any moment. Nobody stealing my piece of shit bike.

>You can't just tell someone to completely change their lifestyle to avoid potential problems, and then act like they are the insane ones for not wanting to listen.

Because of the boon on cycling. We suddenly have big lobbying and activism toward promoting cycling.

The thing is, don't just write off this factor. There's lots of good benefits to society if we all move to bikes and shared infrastructure to rental vehicles or transportation services.

>I want a car. I like my car. Demanding that people give up their ability to get in a car and drive somewhere so that all of America's infrastructure can be changed is insanity.

I don't think anyone is going to that extent to say you can't drive anymore.

>I actually like to leave the cities I live in sometimes. Or maybe I don't live in a city, and I want to visit it with my car.

Nobody is saying you cant drive. No politician will survive assassination if they banned cars.

There are ebikes with >100km electric range that can go 35km/h. Going to be hard to tell me that setup won't do what you want it to do.

Because anti-car people understand that it is absurd to (mainly in cities) sacrifice so much space, environment, and health to accommodate car people's laziness. People living in the city have to sacrifice clean air to support the suburban car commutes. This is absurd. Many car-minded people are simply to lazy to take alternative modes of transportation, even if they exist and are really well implemented (as they are in most European cities).

The Netherlands does this properly. But as a European having traveled to the USA it is mind boggling how car centric cities are. With all the inefficient and extremely costing infrastructure investments car centric cities require.

A solution for people like you would be to park your car near the city borders and take public transport. But I don't know a single car owner who isn't too lazy to just drive straight into the city.

Having designed our cities around the car will be really frowned upon in the future. It's crazy how much people who use alternative modes of transportation sacrifice (in tax and health) to support this.

I live in central valley, California. When I want to visit downtown san Francisco, or SFO Airport, 99% of the times I park at first Bart Station, and use Bart from there. The only time I go not is if I am picking a couple of family with lots of luggage.

So, now you know a car driver who drives about 16k miles a year, and also is not lazy enough to park at city borders & use public transport. & Bart Parking is almost always 60+% full.

Looks like I answered the wrong comment earlier:

> I actually like to leave the cities I live in sometimes.

You can own a car and still use a bike when staying within the city. That's what most people do here.

> Or maybe I don't live in a city, and I want to visit it with my car.

That usually leads to a worse experience than taking public transit or a shared bike, and I don't think this use case should be supported.

What about people who live in the country who don't actually have public transport options?

They can park their car outside the city in the park+ride of their choosing, and take public transport from there. That's what I do.

Empirically, most people care more about making the trip efficiently then how exactly it's done. If all those people are motivated to not use cars, think of how much less traffic there will be for everyone else? It turns out that bike and pedestrian friendly cities are also some of the most car friendly ones for this reason.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

I'm handicapped.

The bike vision of the future features all of these tanned, lean people cycling everywhere (and even making turn signals with their hands, which happens so infrequently IRL that I generally note it at once a year), and I guess everyone else just hopes they don't get stabbed if they ride our quasi-subway.

The NPR page lists a RSS feed

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio

https://feeds.simplecast.com/Y8lFbOT4

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